First up Marshall Simmonds from NY Times (About.com) who talked (very fast) about the complexities of search engine optimization for large publishers.

His employer, the NY Times also hosts several other publications adding to the size and complexity of their SEO initiative.

With the NY Times, he wanted to make it focused, but the NY Times ego created unrealistic expectations. As with many prominent companies, they equated their reputation in the offline world with justification for ranking well online.

Issues contributing to the complexity of big site SEO included: large amount of content, writers not familiar with web writing. rigid CMS and others.

One of the first steps was to “sell search” to NY Times staff and execs which included:

PPC – They use algorithms that were used for stock trading to trade keywords.

– Only work with clients that can provide several weeks/months of historical data
– Big paid search advertisers optimize their paid search campaigns to multiple levels of goals
– Big advertisers expect a forecast
– Synchronize editing of overall campaigns – campaign must be managed centrally or be coordinated.